SEMINAR: Anthropology and Sociology Seminar Series

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is often portrayed in the West as hostile towards religion, and the Party indeed still prohibits its members from joining any religion. How should we understand the apparent incompatibility between the CCP and religion? Is the CCP hostile towards religion because of the atheist ideology of a Communist Party? Or is the CCP, as an ‘organisational emperor’, is concerned with the strong organisational capacity that religious groups have in mobilising contentious politics? Moreover, if we were to study this topic through direct interviews, could we believe what Chinese cadres tell us in the first place? In this work-in-progress presentation, we will report findings revealed by a simple, yet sophisticatedly designed, list experience with 170 junior CCP cadres in Beijing. Our result demonstrates that the problem of social desirability exists in some, but not all, dimensions of the perceptions that Chinese cadres have on religion. We also revealed that Chinese cadres tend to perceive different religions with different levels of concerns, while in general they have much stronger concern over the frequency of religious congregation (i.e. the organisational aspect of religion) than over individual religious participations (i.e. the ideological aspect of religion).